236
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024
236 points (96.1% liked)
Gaming
20010 readers
770 users here now
Sub for any gaming related content!
Rules:
- 1: No spam or advertising. This basically means no linking to your own content on blogs, YouTube, Twitch, etc.
- 2: No bigotry or gatekeeping. This should be obvious, but neither of those things will be tolerated. This goes for linked content too; if the site has some heavy "anti-woke" energy, you probably shouldn't be posting it here.
- 3: No untagged game spoilers. If the game was recently released or not released at all yet, use the Spoiler tag (the little ⚠️ button) in the body text, and avoid typing spoilers in the title. It should also be avoided to openly talk about major story spoilers, even in old games.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
Yeah sure, it's my fault for describing a problem, that's what really causes the problem. Not a multi-billion industry where an ever-shrinking sliver avoids this psychological manipulation to attach a siphon to people's wallets.
Pointing a finger at me, personally, will do less than nothing to fight this trend. Do you want to address that objective reality? Or do you want to project more accusations onto the person describing it?
The fact that you call it ever-shrinking when there is too much to play that doesn't fit into that bucket is exactly what I was talking about. Plus you must have missed the bottom falling out of live service games this past year, perhaps due to a lack of consumer trust in the product lasting long enough to justify their time or money. Sega just spent $70M on a game that they decided was better to never even launch. Sony shrunk their live service portfolio forecast from a dozen down to half of that. These are the microtransaction-driven games.
'Why are you ignoring the problem?' cannot be answered with 'why are you ignoring not the problem?' The existence of things outside a growing issue don't make the issue go away.
This is half the industry, by revenue. 'But it's only half!' is aggressively missing the point.
I'd be fucking thrilled if this all just rolled back of its own accord. But it's not gonna. Outright boycotts accomplished very little - and then dried up. These companies are throwing millions at this crap because it makes billions.
Some of the alleged "retreat" from wallet siphons with no cover charge are just games that will instead have a cover charge. They're not changing the part where you can pay real money for fake hats. They're not changing how much of the game is built around shoving players toward that decision, as often as possible.
Sega's $70M whoopsie-daisy evidently hasn't ruined the company. Nor has it seemed to stop their plans for Dreamcast-era nostalgia-bait games with the same abusive business model as their hilariously-late-to-the-party battle royale cancellation.
Games built around this are a gamble, but slapping it on whatever's already coming out remains cheap, low-risk, and alarmingly popular. It's in full-price, flagship-franchise titles. It's in subscription MMOs. There is no sufficient back-pressure against publishers asking, 'but what if more money?'
What I suggested is not ignoring the problem. Ignoring bad products makes bad products less financially viable. Buying good products instead creates more supply of good products, because producers want the money coming from consumers who only buy good products. This is not a binary boycott vs. no boycott. There is every minute step along the way. Half the industry by revenue is not coming from half the customers.
Nor does it need to. It just shows that they don't think the live service business model they made was going to work; so much so that they flushed their most expensive game to date down the toilet.
There is zero information on their nostalgic franchises play regarding business model. Many of which came from a different era of predatory monetization that came to an end without legislation (the arcades).
There is when you stop buying their games in the first place.
That's why it's spreading. So long as a fraction of people get sucked in - your non-participation does not matter.
Those victims "voted with their wallets" and their vote counts for ten times more than yours. This is why outright vitriolic boycotts barely made a dent. This is why it can creep into existing games, including ones you already bought. They've got your money. They want more.
This business model amounts to a scam. Games make you value arbitrary nonsense - that is what makes them games. There is no ethical form of attaching a real-world price tag to anything inside that make-believe. Convincing you that you need some random imaginary geegaw is half these people's job.
No kidding nobody should throw money at that.
But I don't know why anyone defends its continued existence.